5. The replacement officials continued to be a major black eye for the game. This dispatch from detroitlions.com -- an official team website, part of the league's network of 32 team websites -- was posted Saturday morning, in a column by long-time Lions watcher Mike O'Hara, about the leverage the real officials would have after watching the game in Baltimore:

"The best negotiating leverage any group of workers could hope to have is a game tape of Friday night's game between the Lions and Ravens. The NFL's real referees, who haven't worked in the exhibition season because of stalled contract negotiations with the NFL, could use that tape as a bargaining chip the size of a manhole cover. For the good of the NFL and its image, the league must find a way to replace the replacements with the real guys. The Ravens are one of the NFL's benchmark franchises, and the Lions are a young team on the rise with their own star power. But the third team on the field -- eight men in striped jerseys -- were a disgrace on any level of officiating football.''

Case in point: an 18-yard facemask penalty on Detroit near the end of the first quarter ... after a 2-minute, 50-second delay and series of conferences to figure out how to mark it off. I mean, it's gone too far. Today, for the good of the game, the league negotiators must reach out to representatives for the real officials, including refs Scott Green and Jeff Triplette, and hammer out an agreement.

The officials have to drop their demand to keep a pension that's better than full-time NFL employees have, and the league has to jack up the money it has offered by $10 million or $12 million over the seven-year life of the contract. It's time. I can't say it better than Bears cornerback Charles Tillman did late Saturday night: "Can we get our refs back? ... Replacement refs aren't cutting it.''

I can just imagine how slow things are going sitting in the stadium.
It's just ugly.

I can tell you because I was there. It felt like the longest game ever. You can REALLY see how clueless they are by being there. Watching t.v. you miss whats going on.

Example: There are 2 replay box's. One on each side around the 30yd line. In the Jags game close to the end, when they couldn't figure out the down and distance, the Jags had the ball around the 35yd line. The stupid ref ran all the way down to the opposite replay booth instead of just going to the one he was close to. He did this TWO times for the same play!!! I wanted to go down there and punch him in the face.